Sometimes, political spin doctoring will smash headlong into the wall of reality. In Connecticut recently it was refreshing to see the vindictive, loud voice of attack author and petit politician Jeff Benedict struck down by voters apparently too sophisticated to fall for nonsense issues.
Author Benedict, who attacked the legitimacy of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in his highly anecdotal book “Without Reservation,” failed to win enough support in a local election to force a primary against the front-running Democratic prospect for the nomination for the 2nd Congressional District. Norwich is the closest large city to both the Foxwoods Casino Resort, owned by the Mashantucket Pequots, and to the Mohegan Sun Casino, owned by the Mohegan Tribal Nation.
Benedict, whose claim to fame was a vitriolic denunciation of Mashantucket Pequot tribal success in Connecticut, in a book designed to malign the “bad Indian,” worked hard to pit his own persona as defender of American patriotism, but he could not make it stick. He not only misread the basic record, feeding heavily from the ideologically driven coverage morass produced by the Boston Globe against all Indian gaming (as has The Wall Street Journal), he lost before voters who are looking at wider issues and could not bring themselves to trust him.
Benedict gambled that capitalizing on an anti-Indian sentiment based on some legitimate but very much exaggerated fears of the Indian-with-power-syndrome would put him over the top. Benedict is very much part of the back lash movement that is questioning so-called “special jurisdictions” of Indian peoples, while besmirching the fragility of family lines and tribal identities that have already suffered enough. The insinuation has been that fraud, induced by promise of casino profits, was involved in the tribal recognition process. Since the publication of his book (which is reportedly being developed into a movie), Benedict’s thesis on the illegitimacy of the Pequots has been refuted in other regional publications and he has backed away from his claim.
This Connecticut defeat of the politics of ignorance and bigotry is a good sign. In that state, local municipal leaders are riding a wave against tribal sovereignty and likely tribal gaming enterprises. They assume all the negative propaganda instead of taking the opportunity to turn it into a win-win situation that can create a strong economic foundation for their region. Such it is with the national spin-doctoring game that constantly passes political line for truth seeking. But once in a while, here and there, it hits the wall of larger social reality; in this case a voting public with distasteful for such vulgarity.
It happened to Rush Limbaugh, the syndicated talk-show host, on the issue of Global Warming. Limbaugh, who has berated Indians as “savages,” was swallowing a bit of his own spin on his June 3 nationally syndicated radio show. Limbaugh was mad because the Bush people recently discarded the dumbed-down sawhorse that labeled global warming as a fantasy of “environmental wackos,” (Limbaugh’s phrase). He seethed at what he called “the hijacking of conservatism” by the Bush Administration.
The Bush Administration has now, in a report to the United Nations, completely accepted the scientific basis and decade-long near consensus by the global scholarly community: Global Warming is a reality that is unrelenting and unavoidable to anyone not locked in fundamentalist, ideological mumbo-jumbo. Of course, Limbaugh is a fundamentalist of the most strident variety, who will not accept fact-patterns that don’t fit his ideology. This new turn-about by Bush, who is not yet and may never sign onto the Kyoto Agreement but is instead proposing “voluntary measures” to curtail fossil burnings, has most neo-conservative pundits upset. They should be. Like Benedict in Connecticut, they tried to convince people of a pseudo-idea ? one that breaks when confronted by the reality of the world at large.
Bush perhaps figured out what Limbaugh has not, that of the small group of scientists opposing the global warming evidence most have been anti-environmentalist ideologues, and not a few have collected handsome fees from neo-conservative think tanks.
In the case of Benedict, clearly attempting to first fuel and then ride an anti-Indian sentiment to the halls of government, his main issue did not cross over enough. Reality is that despite their impact on local traffic (a practical problem), Indian casinos in Connecticut and other parts of the Eastern seaboard have done very well, not only for their tribes but also for their non-Native neighbors, of whom they employ thousands while often granting various types of recompense to municipal neighbors. In the case of Connecticut, Indian casinos seriously boost the state budget.
Strident argument is both Benedict’s and Limbaugh’s forte. While this makes for brisk talk-radio programming and bombshell books, it mangles the truth. Over time, however, reality has a way of settling all questions. Throughout American Indian history there have been many Jeff Benedicts; and no doubt more to come.
